When Anne Sexton died in her garage, asphyxiated by exhaust, in October of 1974, a generation of writers and readers were jolted, if not quite surprised. Death had been a main subject of hers; yes, poetry was, in Peter Davison's phrase, a "dangerous trade." When Sexton was twenty-eight, living the hemmed-in life of an unfulfilled…
Bitter Lake A novel by Ann Harleman. Southern Methodist Univ. Press, $22.50 cloth, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Fred Leebron. In her first novel, Bitter Lake, Ann Harleman, the 1993 winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, deftly evokes the complex world of abandonment in a dysfunctional family. Here is a meditative work about family,…
Central Square A novel by George Packer. Graywolf, $24.95 cloth. Reviewed by Don Lee. There is a Cambridge, Massachusetts, with which few outsiders are familiar — the neighborhood that is the title of George Packer’s second novel, Central Square, which squats between posh Harvard and MIT, blighting the main avenue with “its discount shops, foreign…
Richard Tillinghast recommends A Different Person, a memoir by James Merrill (Knopf): “The late James Merrill turns out to have been a perfect memoirist. The life, the sensibility, the writing style, are perfectly of a piece. A past master in his use of metaphor, Merrill brings that gift to his prose.”
Maxine Kumin recommends Black Drum, poems by Enid Shomer: “Dazzling work by a Florida poet now living in Manhattan; Shomer weaves her net so skillfully that the reader is caught up in the story long before realizing the formal element that holds the squares in place. This book deserves serious attention.” (Arkansas)
Cheaters and Other Stories Stories by Dean Albarelli. St. Martin’s, $20.95 cloth. Reviewed by Joan Wickersham. Dean Albarelli’s Cheaters and Other Stories is a collection about moral responsibility, as considered by people who have, for the most part, disappointed themselves. “What he needed was the energy and idealism of his younger self, back when he…
Apology for Want Poems by Mary Jo Bang. Middlebury College, $25.00 cloth, $11.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan Conley. There is quiet anarchy in the spare poems of Mary Jo Bang’s haunting first collection, Apology for Want. The terrain is decidedly American and familiar — one of shopping malls and consumption in the “flinty age of…
Chase Twichell recommends Blood Thirsty Savages, poems by Adrian C. Louis(Time Being): “Louis writes rough, smart, honest poems that cut through all the polite twinges of political correctness. Tenderness is one side of the blade, and rage the other. His Native America is not the one we normally hear about, stripped as it is of…
Child in Amber Poems by Stephen McNally. University of Massachusetts Press, $20.00 cloth. Reviewed by Peter Jay Shippy. Tomaz Salamun wrote that every true poet is a monster. If so, perhaps it is because monsters slap us into a sweet apoplexy from which we can’t escape ourselves. The poems in Stephen McNally’s Juniper Prize-winning…
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